Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Fifty-Seven: The Next Iron Spider

The Next Iron Spider

First Aired: September 21st, 2014

Synopsis: Peter is having lunch with Aunt May when the Juggernaut robs an armoured car outside. By the time Peter's switched to Spider-Man Juggernaut has already been defeated by teenage superhero Squirrel Girl, who caused a lot of property damage in the process. She leaves, after which Juggernaut reveals he was only pretending to be defeated, but Spider-Man defeats him easily nevertheless. Nick Fury calls Spidey and tells him that he wants Amadeus Cho, a classmate of Peter's who's the seventh smartest person in the world, to be recruited for SHIELD. Spider-Man's reluctant to do so. The next day at school Peter brings in the Iron Spider armour, since apparently he's allowed to let people take photos next to it for a fundraiser, but it gets taken away by Stan, the new principal of the school, since Fury wouldn't want it to be available to people, but Peter discovers it's Taskmaster in disguise and changes to Spider-Man. While fighting Taskmaster with Nova and Luke, Amadeus somehow gets into the armour and helps fight Taskmaster, but Taskmaster escapes midway through the fight.

Amadeus refuses to take off the armour and leaves, and ends up getting approached by Taskmaster. Spider-Man shows up and Amadeus soon realises who's the villain and who's the hero, but in response Taskmaster takes control of the Iron Spider with a virus. Luke and Nova try fighting Taskmaster while Spider-Man works with Amadeus to write code to stop the virus, but once they've removed it Taskmaster sets the armour to explode and leaves. Spider-Man and Amadeus are able to stop it from exploding, and in the aftermath Amadeus tries returning the armour to Spider-Man. Spider-Man tells him he's earned it, and takes Amadeus to SHIELD to be a new recruit. Amadeus reveals, however, that from Taskmaster's virus he was able to discover that Taskmaster has a list of teenage heroes he wants to recruit. The list is exactly the same as SHIELD's, meaning that there's either a double agent in SHIELD or Taskmaster has access to their systems.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Stan Lee, or more accurately, Stan the Janitor, is now the principal of the school, as a result of Coulson being away on his top-secret mission.
• Peter mentions that Amadeus Cho is so smart that he's banned from game shows. In the comics Amadeus Cho won a game show that was set up by another genius to find potential rivals, and Amadeus winning it led to his family getting killed. Whoops.

Review: On paper, I should hate this episode. This version of Amadeus Cho is pretty boring (side note: go read The Incredible Hercules by Fred van Lente and Greg Pak; it's fucking awesome and underrated), and Peter is, as usual, being a massive dick - in this case, he's jealous that Amadeus is smarter than him. Throw in Squirrel Girl defeating Juggernaut in a nonsensical way, emphasising the damage she caused and showing that she didn't really defeat Juggernaut, and then on top of that have Spider-Man defeat Juggernaut incredibly easily (taser webs: they really are one of the laziest plot devices, aren't they?)...yeah, I don't think any of the writers understand these characters.

In reality, though, this episode is more dry than anything. I see all these things and more - Amadeus being dropped into the story after never having been shown or mentioned before, Peter randomly rolling out the Iron Spider to a school event with a lazy excuse because Amadeus needs to be able to steal it, Taskmaster apparently teleporting away midway through the first fight, Amadeus somehow being able to rewrite the Iron Spider's code with his mind - and I just roll my eyes. None of it's good writing, and I definitely think they've wasted things by making Taskmaster an active player rather than a mysterious shadowy figure in this arc, but I just can't get worked up about any of this. I don't know, maybe I've developed Stockholm Syndrome.

So, is the episode good then? God no, did you not just read the above two paragraphs? It's clunky, full of lazy writing, and none of the characters felt engaging. Giving Amadeus the Iron Spider suit doesn't really feel like a good fit, and the bit with Juggernaut at the start reeks of padding. And yet, it felt like it dragged less than most episodes and I didn't struggle too much with writing the synopsis, so...let's call it merely bad rather than really bad, even though the latter is probably what it deserves.